Most business owners are anxious to grow and expand, but trying to grow your business too soon can lead to undesired consequences. At the same time, waiting too long can lead to stagnation, causing you to lose market share to your competitors.
How can you tell when it’s time to start scaling your business? The following six signs are all good indicators that you’re ready to take the leap.
1. You Have a Strong Cash Flow & Working Capital
If you’re trying to decide when to grow your business, start by taking a look at your books. If you’ve got a solid positive cash flow and plenty of working capital for your day-to-day operations, then you’re in a good position to weather the strains that often come with expansion.
Note that you don’t necessarily have to have enough cash on hand to cover what you need to grow. As long as your finances are in order, now may be a great time to find out how much funding you can get to help you expand.
2. You Have a Solid Customer Base
If you’ve built up a strong base of customers who are interested in and engaged with your brand, this is definitely a good sign that what you’re doing is working. In this case, you may want to focus on expanding into a new – but similar – target market that is likely to respond in the same way. Another option is to work on finding ways to deliver even more value to your current customer base.
3. You’ve Met Your Current Goals
Hopefully, you’ve set some SMART (specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and time-bound) goals for your business. If you’ve met all of your short-term goals, it makes sense to take the next step and start focusing on your big-picture goals.
It’s important to note, though, that just accomplishing your goals isn’t enough. You also need to understand how reaching them has now put you in the best possible position to continue growing your business. At this point, you may want to research how to get a small business loan so you have the financial support you need to move on to your next objective.
4. You’re No Longer Struggling to Run Your Operations
In the first few years of running your business, you may have found that everything felt like a challenge. It’s normal to spend a lot of your time figuring out the best way to do things, trying to find the right employees, and getting them properly trained. Once things start to run smoothly, you’ll be able to start thinking about taking the next step.
5. Your Customers Want More
If you’ve noticed that your customer base has become less engaged, this could be a sign that you need to make some changes. While it’s important to evaluate what has caused the decline, there’s a chance that you aren’t keeping up with their evolving expectations.
In this case, your expansion could involve improving your customer service, developing new products or services that your customers want, or even moving to a new geographic location.
6. Your Resources Are Maxed Out
Reaching your business goals and keeping up with evolving customer expectations requires a lot of work. You may find that your team and your resources are maxed out by simply trying to maintain the status quo. At some point, this could lead to you no longer having enough capacity to keep your business moving in the right direction.
If you’ve found that your business is stagnating due to a lack of qualified staffing, space, or equipment, this might be a sign that you need to take out a business loan and make the investments you need to get your business back on track.
Zinch Offers Financing to Help You Grow Your Business
If some of these signs that it’s time to grow your business look familiar, there’s a good chance you’ll need some extra funds for your expansion. Zinch offers a variety of flexible financing solutions for small business owners. Contact us at (714) 500-6622 to learn more about your options. You could qualify for up to $250,000 in just 24 hours.
